Careers at Coral River

We are hiring. Two programs right now: an apprenticeship for new CS graduates and an internship for undergraduates.

Before we describe them, the short version of how this company hires: we are looking for people who can think, learn fast, and be honest about being wrong. We are not looking for people who already know the right answer. The right answer is usually a moving target; the skill we are interested in is the skill of finding it.

If that sounds like you, keep reading.

Apprenticeship — two-year program for new CS graduates

The apprenticeship is the main way someone joins Coral River as an engineer. It is a two-year program built around one bet: that a fresh CS graduate with strong abstract reasoning is more valuable, after two years of intensive first-principles training, than a five-year mid-level engineer who has learned to ship inside a framework without questioning it.

Medicine has nurses and doctors. Legal has paralegals and lawyers. Software has the same divide. We are training doctors.

Where it leads: if the two years go well, the apprentice becomes a full-time engineer here, free to specialize in the area they care about most. The offer is competitive pay, a supportive culture, real flexibility with hours, and a depth of experience most jobs will never give you.

The program includes:

• A curriculum that goes down the stack, not across it. Apprentices write compilers, build operating-system-level pieces, design protocols, and re-implement the things most engineers treat as given. The point is not the artifact. The point is the understanding.
• Mentorship from people who built this stack. The work being done at Coral River is unusual; the people leading the apprenticeship are the same people designing the systems the apprentice will work on.
• A real salary and real benefits. The program is paid employment, not a "boot camp" the apprentice pays into. Compensation is shaped to the individual — we ask each candidate what matters to them, and we tailor pay, hours, retirement, health, and time off to that answer rather than handing out a one-size package.

Who we are hiring for it

• Recent CS graduates (or about to graduate) who want to be excellent engineers and are willing to be uncomfortable for two years to get there.
• People who can hold a conversation about a problem they have never seen before, change their mind when shown a better argument, and ask the next clarifying question without performing certainty they do not have.
• People who can be in the office. The apprenticeship is in-person. We have made the in-person experience worth the commute — flexible hours, real equipment, real autonomy, real vacation — but the work is shoulder-to-shoulder, not remote.

Who we are not hiring for it

• People who want to ship in a framework as fast as possible. There are companies that need that and pay well for it; we are not one of them.
• People who memorize answers. The interview is a Socratic dialogue and it is built to be useless to anyone who prepared with a study guide.
• People who treat being corrected as humiliation. Correction is the job.

The interview

We do not give whiteboard coding problems. The interview is a long, real conversation about a real problem, in which the interviewer probes how you think, watches what happens when your first answer is wrong, and changes the problem under you to see how you adapt. You do not need to bring memorized solutions. You do need to bring the willingness to reason out loud and to admit when you are stuck.

The interview was designed against the same standards we use for the work itself: clear, demanding, not cruel, and immune to being out-prepared by an AI.

Internship — for undergraduates

We also hire interns, on a smaller scale and a shorter horizon. The internship is for college students who want to work somewhere real for a summer or a semester and find out whether the apprenticeship is the next step for them.

Interns do real work, the same way apprentices do. They are paid. They get a clear first-week mission so the first week is not "wandering around guessing what matters." They are mentored. They are not running coffee.

The internship is in-person. If you are in college and curious about how a company like this operates from the inside, the internship is the lowest-stakes way to find out.

Working at Coral River

A few things to know before you apply.

We like to own the stack, top to bottom. We would rather understand and control the layers most companies inherit than take them on faith, and we favor low-level tools that make that possible, like Rust. You can specialize, but you have to be able to understand the whole system, not just your corner of it.

The mission is the mission. Coral River was founded on a Christian worldview and that shapes the work, the decisions about what we build and what we will not build, and the way the company carries itself in public. The full working agreement we give every team member is direct about this. You do not have to share the founder's faith to work here, and we do not require employees to personally affirm beliefs they do not hold. You do need to be willing to support the company's mission in the work you do for it.

The office matters. We are an in-person team. The office is not an open-plan hellscape and the equipment is not a five-year-old laptop. We have invested in making the in-person experience better than the average remote setup. If commuting and being in a room with people is a non-starter for you, we are not the right place.

The apprenticeship is two years. That is a real commitment from us and from the apprentice. The thing we are giving you is unusual and slow to build. It is not a six-month rotation.

You will be wrong sometimes. So will we. The standard is that we say so out loud and we replace the worse answer with the better one. If that environment sounds like a relief, you will probably like it here. If it sounds like a threat, you probably will not.

How to apply

If you are interested in the apprenticeship or the internship:

1. Send an email to apply@coralriver.com.
2. Include your name, what you are applying for, and a short note (a paragraph is fine) about what you have read on this site and why you are reaching out.
3. Attach a résumé if you have one.

If you are still in school and unsure where you would fit, send the email anyway. Tell us where you are. We will tell you honestly whether and when there is a path.